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more about "American Cantos — RED ONE PRODUCTION…", posted with vodpod
This is a sublime short film by Joe Taylor, with a tip of the blogging hat to Patrick Zimmerman for flagging this up. He shot it with the stunning Red One digital HD camera (if I had a million dollars…). Taylor’s filming style reminds me of some of the atmospheric work of Ron Fricke of Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka fame.
Both cinematographers rely on stunningly framed shots of beautiful landscapes, even if the landscapes are beautiful in subtle, slightly under appreciated ways like the scenes of rusting windmills and half-collapsed barns.
I grew up in rural Illinois, and I still find farm scenes very evocative. They whisper home in my ear. They wrap me, sometimes uncomfortably, in the warmth of nostalgia. When we’re younger, home seems something to escape from, but as we grow older, the burnished memories beckon. The sharp edges are worn smooth with time, and we long for something that probably never was and probably never will be.
That speaks to the tension I find in myself so often. I am a nomad who longs for a sense of being rooted. I love the quiet solitude of the countryside and open spaces but, just like Jack Kerouac, need my noisy bursts of city excitement. I am sure that I am not alone in struggling to balance the tensions of my personality. I expect there are few who stand poised on the fulcrum of their conflicting desires apart from all too fleeting moments. However, I know that too often I fail to savour the moment I’m in and instead long for moments I remember or at least think I remember.
I suppose that all this is part of the human condition rather than a personal failing. Contentment has always been elusive, and the bliss of it is probably – like all positive emotions – twinned with its absence. The tricky bit for me comes in feeling my way through these tensions in my personality. Am I simply suffering yet another bout of the ‘grass is greener’ or are these slight pangs of dissatisfaction something I should pay attention to?
I’ve now lived in two capital cities for more than a decade. They are strange places. Most people there can’t conceive of how the rest of the world isn’t as obsessed about politics as they are. Not just that, but most of them think the social drama that plays out around politics is infinitely fascinating rather than what most people see it as, tediously juvenile. Strip away the power and the real impact that some of this soap opera has, and it really bears a striking resemblance to angst-y teenage self-obsession. It’s really best to maintain a healthy distance, which is why most people do.
This Family Guy parody isn’t just poking fun at political cartoons, it’s also poking fun at the bubble mentality of Capitol Hill in Washington and the Westminster Village in London. Unfortunately, I’ve lived in the bubbles so long, I might be one of the few people who will actually laugh at it. I think I need a new injection of perspective. Trip to the countryside anyone?
Grabbity vogue-ing for the camera, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
This is a picture of our new little kitteh, Grabbity. She’s a little over 10 weeks old in this picture, and she’s a glorious bundle of cuteness and energy. She’s currently bombing around our flat and playing with everything that isn’t nailed down. She’s settled in at the flat so well.
Right now, she’s trying to climb Suw while she types away on her computer. We’re overwhelmed by her cuteness, and I apologise if the blog gets a little kitten heavy in the near future.
Suw Charman, London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop speeches at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London by Cory Doctorow
For Ada Lovelace Day, it will probably come as no surprise that I’m choosing to blog about Suw, my wife and mad ninja geek soulmate. Suw came up with the idea for Ada Lovelace Day because she often went to conferences where no women were on the panels, even though she knew plenty of incredibly talented, intelligent women who would contribute to the discussion about technology and social media.
As she said when she launched Ada Lovelace Day:
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised.
It’s not necessarily a lack of women in technology that Suw was mourning, but a lack of visibility.
Suw also wanted to highlight the contributions of women in technology and science so they can serve as role models for girls. I’m from the US, and it’s long been known that girls start school with strong math skills but lose interest in their tweens, mostly due to social pressure. Suw said that the situation is similar here in the UK.
One of the reasons I chose Suw is because I think she’s a great role model for girls who want to study technology and science. When Suw and I first started dating, I remarked to a friend that she was probably the first woman I dated who out-geeked me, and while that might sound like typical male insecurities, I love her for it. Being a geek is not just about skills and knowledge but also about passion, and she has a passion for knowledge, not just in terms of computers and the internet but for all kinds of knowledge, whether it was the geology she studied at university, physics or psychology. Her curiosity is limitless, and if we share a common failing it is that we’re so curious about nearly everything that we sometimes find it difficult to focus on just one thing. She is a keen observer, and she quickly turns from noting a trend or a pattern to asking deeper questions about the underlying causes and motivations driving that trend. She wants to understand the world around her.
She also is a pioneer. I felt like a blogging charlatan when I met her. I started blogging in 2004 at the request of my editor at the BBC. I quickly fell in love with it, but Suw had been exploring blogs and other forms of social media long before. She set herself up as a ‘blogging consultant’, and many people told her that she couldn’t make a living with it. But she has, largely because she was years ahead of the curve of blogging and social media consultants that have sprung up in the past few years, and she remains ahead.
One of the things that keeps her ahead of the curve is not just her knowledge of the technology but also a deep understanding of people’s relationship to the technology and how social motivations influence our use of technolgy. I think the psychology of social media is fascinating, and I think Suw’s understanding that the fundamental human need to not only express ourselves but to communicate drives so much of the current trends online and on mobile.
She’s also a doer, and I think that Ada Lovelace Day proves it. She realised that highlighting women’s contributions in technology is important, and instead of getting frustrated, she did something, something that she hopes to build on. For all these reasons and more, that’s why I have chosen to blog about Suw Charman-Anderson, my wife and someone who I think is not only inspirational to girls looking to become tomorrow’s technology leaders but someone who inspires me.
More snow in north London, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
It doesn’t look like this will cause too much (more) travel chaos in London, but outside of the Big Smoke, it looks like it’s going to shut down the country yet again. I love it. I can’t really believe that some local authorities are running out of grit after only a few days of this. I guess it shows how rare this..
The Great London Blizzard of ‘09, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.
I was shutter-bugging on my way into work today. Public transport in London wasn’t transporting much of the public due to the ‘extreme weather event’ or what one more used to snow might call a good few inches of the white stuff. Due to the aforementioned extreme weather, I walked to work. The weather seemed to have got the coots in the canal a little flustered and they were thrashing about or in this case skipping across the water.
Woody Guthrie from Wikicommons
After watching the inauguration and knowing the challenges that we all face, not just back in home in the United States but here in Britain and all around the world, I still retain my optimism, although some accuse us Americans of allowing that to slip into naïveté. My optimism is tempered by an awareness of the severity of this economic crisis, but I’ve always been realistic and pragmatic. To me, it’s part of the values from my family and from where I grew up, the Midwest in the US.
It’s at times like this I think back to Woody Guthrie and his songs of hope during the dark days of the Great Depression. The next few years aren’t going to be easy, but together, yes, we can. Woody once said:
I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.
more about “Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencemen…“, posted with vodpod
Steve Jobs is a great story teller, and he’s proven that you can tell stories through computer hardware. This is a little less fluid than his normal delivery, but the story is fascinating. Love what you do, and a lot of things will follow from there.
Steve says:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
more about “Things to do before I’m dead: Learn t…“, posted with vodpod
OK, that’s a bit of a morbid way of putting it. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon, but I fear that I’ve been putting things off for a while. When I moved to London in 2005, I didn’t know how long I would be here. When I left the US, I was told that it would be a year long assignment, but when I landed I was told that it might only be six months due to budget cuts. Then, six months grew into a year and a half, and then I changed jobs, and it’s almost four years later. Everything has had a temporary feel about it, even after I met Suw and we got married. I still feel as if I’m living out of a suitcase. Longer term plans that take a little time and preparation were put on hold.
It being a new year and old, I’ve thought about dusting off some old dreams and moving towards them. I’d really love to learn how to fly. Growing up, my family had a single engine plane, a Cessna 172. We used to fly it on short trips. My brother once took the passenger-side controls for a brief time, but I was too young ever to fly it before my parents sold it. It was one of the reasons why I was interested in flight and originally studied aeronautical and astronautical engineering at university. Looking at a video like this, it reminds me of why I have always been fascinated with flight, and it makes me want to commit to learn how to fly.
more about “One year in 40 seconds on Vimeo“, posted with vodpod
I just love this video. It’s almost meditative. I remember growing up in rural Illinois how I used to mark time in seasons, planting in the spring, the corn growing in the summer and then harvest in the fall. I miss that languorous sweep. Now, time seems to rush by without any particular rhythm. Taking a minute to think about it, I guess it’s a bit ironic that an entire year compressed into 40 seconds reminds me of that slow seasonal sweep of time. It takes a pause of less than a minute to remind me of the slow passage of seasons.
Thanks to Adrian Holovaty for Tweeting this to my attention.
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